Asphalt Spirits NYC

Asphalt Spirits NYC: 1976-1986, A Journey into Remembrance & Awakening, is a poetic, immersive photographic and soundscape installation chronicling New York City and its people. The images are a meditation on the beauty and mystery within the everyday lives of New Yorkers, navigating the intersection of race, class, gender, identity, social and cultural conditioning. From 1976 to 1986 and 1999 to 2021, I walked the streets of the city with a camera strapped to my hand, riveted by the vibrancy, depth, and presence of the people I met. Turning each corner became a daily awakening in embracing the immediacy of the moment and fullness of life in one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world.

The work in Asphalt Spirits NYC: 1976-1986, shot on Kodachrome color and Tri-X black-and-white film, is a portrait from a bygone era in a city on the brink of bankruptcy, teeming with drugs and violence, beset by the AIDS crisis and haunted by racial injustice and longstanding class divisions. At the time, New York was a place where the emanation of hip hop, punk, and street art intermingled with the rise of extravagance, greed, and gentrification. 

Asphalt Spirits NYC: 1976-1986, is an ode to this time, to the relentless movement of the city’s eight million people, to their resilience, creativity, and wild spirit. Each photograph, investigates the many dimensions of who we truly are and the world we live in.

In these extraordinary and challenging times, Asphalt Spirits NYC: A Journey into Remembrance & Awakening is an invitation to reflect on our past and the direction we’re heading, bringing further understanding of ourselves, our neighbors and our environment.

Asphalt Spirits NYC: 1976-1986, is the first installment of a photographic and soundscape installation and photo book project, followed by Asphalt Spirits NYC: 1999-2021. 

Julian Cox, museum photography curator and chief curator and deputy director at the Art Gallery of Ontario, said of Perry’s work, “His photographs are intimate, thoughtful fragments, lovingly wrested from the whirr and hum of daily life in New York. A stilled quiet pervades these pictures, achieved through a subtly anonymous stance that is developed and knowing.  Perry is a storyteller whose photographs have the broad, resonant structure of elemental tales. As an installation and published monograph photo book volumes, Asphalt Spirits NYC:1976-1986 and Asphalt Spirits NYC: 1999-2021 would make for an important addition to the field.”